Most CPU efficient host?

[Hink]

Well... can you really trust the hateboys ? Can you trust the fanboys ?

It's pretty easy to differ between fanboys/haters and people who post their objective non-biased opinion. You just gotta remove the hand from your eyes.

There's a lot of posts in this thread from people (including myself) who tried several hosts and can damn well compare to them. What's a poll and this thread worth if you don't trust any1?

I dislike both labels, when it comes to personal taste who is to judge the feelings of others. The best advertising imo is word of mouth...I trust mt contemporaries opinions much more than that of marketing experts and when people are enthusiastic spreading the word is showing your respect to both the company that makes the product and your peers looking for advice.

When it comes to disliking a product being vocal (as long as you remain respectful) is of equal value, again I go back to my own ways of buying gear and that's to not shop for features but to shop for benefits which is relative and subjective. In this case (and I have never tried reaper) a benefit for the OP is the cost of reaper, that's relative to his own needs. In my own case if someone says something doesn't handle this or that well my first concern is whether or not I need that feature. I love online reviews of everything, Amazon is great for this but tbh the first reviews I read are the worst ones. Often I find it's user error or unrealistic expectations unless I see a theme like "lasted one week and died" repeated. Next I read the middle of the road reviews and finally the best reviews (or a sampling of each when there are hundreds of reviews)

So what about those who have to post about the same thing all the time? How many times a day do you see the same dad on tv for things? Get over it people, if nothing else it's a lesson on how to be pro-active in your deciphering of reviews and ads. It helps you learn when it's an obvious shill and when it's sincere which are very good tools to have. Nobody forces anyone to read posts so if you dont like it dont read it.

I'll never understand why it calls for name calling, insults and flame wars though...tbh when someone seems to think being offensive is appropriate the value of their advice drops considerably...so I'll never understand what good both labels bring to the table.

BTW Mutant, I miss your truck

[trimph1]

Like I said, all labels do is avoid questions about what is really going on. Sometimes DAW's may not work as effectively with some people's workflow and other times maybe they do.

[jancivil]

polls are helpful, if not scientific.

REAPER will win, and may be truly the most efficient. If this passes without criticism though there might be people making decisions out of bad information... unless everyone is going to go for Reaper anyway.



I'm affected by an ad populum argument in reverse, I have never been so averse to a bit of software as I am with that one...

we all have some irrational fears and prejudices

But I DON'T fear the Reaper! In fact I have a copy on both my DAW machines. I just have no reason to use it. It does not do everything I require a DAW host to do and the thing (the whole area) I know it won't do is primary to me.

[deleted]

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[hibidy]

Just when I thought I have nothing else to say

It's all good. I love that there are so many choices. Use what you like, my comments were at least in attempt, to say what the most efficient host was. All the other stuff doesn't matter, I can only go by what has happened to me

[Mutant]

i like the votes for the DAWs not even supporting multicore architecture best!

Heh thats exactly why i proposed the "scientific" experiment that would give us some objective numbers instead of a poll in which some people just vote for their favorite host.

[jancivil]

Just when I thought I have nothing else to say

It's all good. I love that there are so many choices. Use what you like, my comments were at least in attempt, to say what the most efficient host was. All the other stuff doesn't matter, I can only go by what has happened to me

dude! reaper is winning! be happy. that means you're winning, no?

[Mutant]

dude! reaper is winning! be happy. that means you're winning, no?

Yeah yeah...

But !

If REAPER is really the most CPU efficient host (and AFAIK it really is), then it should get 100% votes here not 48% lol...


The situation here is as surreal as asking "Which country is the most populous." and getting only about 48% "China" and even 1 vote for Luxembourg and 1 for Vatican...

[LawrenceF]

I didn't vote in the OP's poll (no Garageband choice, I only ever vote GB in every Internet DAW poll, no matter what it's about ) but Reaper is certainly the most cpu efficient host I own.

I don't see the very wide margins others regularly report but there is a margin there for sure.

Some of the other stuff gets subjective, like what buffer sizes you can run when playing midi with heavy loads and all that. I never have to go below 256 to play midi and I can even do it at 512 with no problematic latency, so a lot of the discussions about necessarily running at 64 samples doesn't really apply to me as a practical matter.

It might be interesting to compare reported latency figures from PCI drivers, FW drivers and USB drivers. I don't think they'd all be exactly the same at the same buffer settings so some of it may be apples and oranges, references to a lowest acceptable buffer setting, dunno.

I might add, with hardware midi instruments Reaper is the only host I own that actually requires low latency... passes the midi signal through (or delays the signal by the latency of) the audio buffers, which is (imo) a bit unusual.

But with virtual instruments I haven't personally used anything that appears to use CPU quite as efficiently as Reaper across the board.

[xamido]

Studio One does have CPU issue. Luckily with the new version i can finally see which plugin is using the most cpu power. It really helps me to remove the one that uses the most power.

I'm downloading reaper now. Thanks to this thread i want to know what the hype is all about.

[heffus]

Studio One does have CPU issue. Luckily with the new version i can finally see which plugin is using the most cpu power.

How do you do that?

[xamido]

Studio One does have CPU issue. Luckily with the new version i can finally see which plugin is using the most cpu power.

How do you do that?

Pretty easy, just click the performance meter on the bottom left of the transport bar and check the show device tab.

[tony tony chopper]

If REAPER is really the most CPU efficient host (and AFAIK it really is), then it should get 100% votes here not 48% lol...

CPU efficiency largely depends on projects or type of benchmark.
+the fact that Reaper is known to appear more efficient for reasons that noobs don't understand (I even read silly stuff like "it can process 10x more plugins than another host"). But there have been threads about that.

That's if we're talking about plugins (because that's where most of the CPU goes in a normal project).

[chk071]

I dislike both labels, when it comes to personal taste who is to judge the feelings of others. The best advertising imo is word of mouth...I trust mt contemporaries opinions much more than that of marketing experts and when people are enthusiastic spreading the word is showing your respect to both the company that makes the product and your peers looking for advice.

What i certainly don't get is what a review based on experience, like me comparing my hosts in terms of CPU efficiency, has to do with taste at all. If i do a comparison, host A, B and C, if all hosts are running at same sample rate, ASIO driver settings and overall make sure i have nearly similar environment. Then i check which host is booting up the quickest, check, when the program is running, how much CPU and RAM it consumes, then load up a fairly CPU consuming plugin (in my case Tyrell N6), play the same sound and check how the VST performance is. The result i present has nothing at all to do with taste but with my personal experience on which is most system efficient host. On my computer of course. Then i go to KVR forum, post my experience, see that (wow a miracle!) many other came to the same conclusion, and overall you can get a nice picture about the original question of this topic. At least that's how it could be.

[tony tony chopper]

then load up a fairly CPU consuming plugin (in my case Tyrell N6), play the same sound and check how the VST performance is.

you open *one* plugin? How/why would a host be more efficient than another with just 1 plugin?